There's Always The Hills

By Cameron McNeish and Sam Heughan

'A wonderful, personal book.' -Sam Heughan, star of OutlanderFrom his home in the Cairngorms of Scotland, Cameron McNeish reflects on a life dedicated to the outdoors.A prolific author, McNeish has led treks in the Himalayas and Syria, edited The Great Outdoors Magazine, establishing it as Britain's premier walking publication, created new long-distance walks and made television series, contributed a monthly column to Scots Magazine, campaigned for Scottish independence and raised a family with his wife, Gina.In this long-awaited autobiography, he candidly recalls the ups and downs of a full life, much of it in the public eye, much of it until now unseen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandstone Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781910985960

Cameron McNeish

Cameron McNeish is an established figure on the Scottish and British outdoor scene. As editor of TGO he increased circulation and established the magazine as Britain’s premier walking publication. He is the author of numerous books and presenter of many outdoor television programmes, including several on long distance walks.

Book preview

Introduction

The film producer Samuel Goldwyn once said he didn’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they were dead. It’s also been claimed that a definition of an autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing. So, given that I’m still relatively hale and hearty I might argue against this story of mine being described as a pure autobiography and, as I have done in so many aspects of my life, will happily follow in the footsteps of my old friend Tom Weir who once suggested that his own story was more of an ‘autobiography of sorts’.

More importantly, if you’ll excuse the religious parallels, the following chapters represent more of a book of thanksgiving, my way of saying thanks to the dozens, if not hundreds of individuals who have influenced aspects of my life, a life that has been shaped by so many into a journey that has allowed me to follow my dreams, and none more so than the late Chris Brasher.

From my own days in track and field athletics, I was well aware of Chris’ achievements – a vital pace-maker when Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes; 1956 Olympic champion in the 3000 metres steeplechase; founder of the hugely successful London Marathon; and along with John Disley, the man who was largely responsible for introducing orienteering to the shores of the UK – but Chris Brasher was also an enthusiastic and entrepreneurial mountaineer and hillwalker.

He had been a member of various international climbing expeditions and, during his time as head of outside broadcasts at the BBC, produced and presented the incredibly popular Old Man of Hoy climb in Orkney with a stellar cast of climbers including Dougal Haston, Joe Brown, Chris Bonington, Tom Patey and others.

I first met Chris when the Ministry of Defence tried to buy the Knoydart Peninsula in the early eighties. I was in the early days of my writing career and he quickly enlisted my help in publicising the situation, a state of affairs that became the genesis of the Knoydart Foundation which, in turn, spawned the well-known wild land charity, the John Muir Trust.

In the following years, I came to know Chris very well and we enjoyed plenty of great hill days together in the Lake District and in various parts of Scotland, so he was an obvious choice when I had to choose guests for my first BBC2 television series Wilderness Walks in 1996. The idea was that we’d take a multi-day walk in the Cairngorms and discuss how wild landscapes had affected his life and career. Shortly after he arrived in Aviemore to begin the walk Chris asked if we minded if he disappeared for a day during the week. Further to all his other interests he and his wife Shirley owned several race horses and that week one of his horses was due to run at Punchestown near Dublin. He was keen to see it perform.

As you can imagine, this posed considerable problems for our filming schedule, but director Richard Else came up with a plan. He would hire a helicopter to take all of us, the whole five-man crew, across to Dublin for the day. We would film Chris and me going to the races and use it as part of the production. Initially all went well. The helicopter picked us up at Glenmore Lodge near Aviemore, we flew the length of the Kintyre Peninsula and across to Northern Ireland and then along the Irish coast to Dublin and Punchestown. Brasher was in his element, showing off to his horse racing friends. It’s not every day you arrive at a race meeting in a helicopter with a television crew following your every move, not unless you’re the Queen or a very rich Middle-Eastern Sheik.

I put a tenner on Chris’ horse, the first and only horse racing bet I’ve ever made – I had to ask Chris how you went about it – and we wandered to the stand for a better view. All the time I was wondering why Chris hadn’t put money on his own horse. We got into position midway up the stand, with my old friend Duncan McCallum operating the camera and a young Keith Partridge (long before he became a well-known adventure cameraman) recording the sound, and it wasn’t long before the horses were paraded out, lithe, muscled and shining in the afternoon sun. Chris pointed out his own mount, appropriately named Mister Boots, and then they were off.

The least I expected was a decent race after all the effort it had taken to get there, but the gambling gods decided otherwise. Brasher’s horse fell at the very first hurdle.

It was a disaster. With his jockey dismounted, poor old Mister Boots took off and was last seen galloping in the direction of County Kildare. I half expected Chris to be distraught but he simply shrugged his shoulders, gave a wan smile and said, ‘Ah well, there’s always the hills.’

It’s a simple notion, pure escapism if you like, but I sense there’s something deeper than mere escapism in the idea of returning to the comforting bosom of Mother Nature. For as long as I can remember, that has been my panacea for times of disappointment or grief. The hills have always been my salvation.

As a young international long-jumper, I was very disappointed not to make the team for the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1970. I took myself away from the sports stadium to the summit of Arthur’s Seat, that wonderful old volcano that dominates our capital city, and gazed across the Firth of Forth to Fife and the Highland hills beyond. Up there, with the skylarks singing, life felt less dark and gloomy.

I remember climbing a hill called Beinn Fhionnlaidh a few days after my mother’s funeral. As with many people when a parent passes away I was overcome by a sense of guilt – I should have done more for her, I should have visited her more often, I wasn’t as good a son to her as I could have been – a guilt list that I guess was largely unjustified, created by grief, sadness and a profound sense of loss. In considerable mental turmoil, I took to the hills and chose a rather isolated Munro. Beinn Fhionnlaidh lies between the great sea lochs of Loch Creran and Loch Etive and is a long whaleback of a mountain that rises fairly gently from the wooded flatlands at the head of Loch Creran to a steep blunt nose overlooking the densely forested slopes of Glen Etive. I knew from previous experience that the hill’s summit not only felt appreciably shy and retiring, as the old guidebooks would have it, but was positively misanthropic.

I made my way past some old shielings and onto the lower bracken-covered slopes of this north-north-east ridge where an argocat track gave me a line to follow, all the way up the ridge to a high corrie below the steep rocky slopes of Fhionnlaidh’s north-west top. Some steep scrambling took me through a band of crags to the stony summit ridge and over a couple of rises to the summit itself, with its small cairn. My arrival at the cairn coincided with a rain shower so it was no place to linger, but as the shower abated on my descent the long views began to appear, out the length of Loch Creran to Loch Linnhe and the Sound of Mull. I could see the Paps of Jura and Ben More on Mull and, closer at hand, the Corbett of Fraochaidh and the twin tops of Beinn a’ Bheithir dominating the forested pass that runs from Elleric to Ballachulish.

Moments like these are special. It’s when you tend to feel most insignificant, especially when compared to the lasting reality of wide open skies, mountains and forests. It’s when you realise that our human lifespans are a mere flicker in the geological sense of time. As I looked out across that dimming horizon I felt a growing sense of peace, an awareness of my own destiny and a realisation that my dear mother was now free from pain and turmoil. It was a cathartic moment.

There have been lots of these liberating moments in my life. When I was in my forties a hill-running accident (I tripped and fell down a crag) left me with a broken wrist, a broken ankle and forty stitches in my head. During my period of convalescence, I was aware that I was becoming depressed. I wasn’t sleeping well, I had become short tempered and comparatively slight setbacks cast me into a slough of despond. I wasn’t a very nice person to live with. While I was thankful to be alive, it wasn’t until I was well enough to limp out into the forest on crutches that I began to feel a mental improvement. I recognised almost immediately the healing nature of this kind of exposure to the natural world and those short excursions into the forest quickly became a crucial element in my recuperation.

In these early years of the twenty-first century, political events sometimes move so fast, and often in the strangest ways, that it’s very easy to feel alienated and ultimately stressed. We become aware that other people govern and control large portions of our lives, and some of these people (usually remote politicians) make decisions that directly affect us, whether we like it or not. Many of the daily schedules that we adhere to are not of our own making but are imposed on us by others. In our capitalist society we are urged, and sometimes compelled, to work harder and harder, not for our own personal satisfaction but to satisfy the unquenchable thirst for profitability of those faceless folk we call shareholders. We live in a technological world that appears to be moving faster and faster and, if we can’t keep up with the pace, society will find a robot to do our job for us. It’s scary and it’s no small wonder more and more of us want to cry out, ‘Stop and let me get off!’

In distant times people lived their lives in fear of invoking the wrath of the gods. Today we live in fear of upsetting shareholders, or the handful of individuals who keep a tight rein on our media outlets.

Over the years I’ve slowly become more and more aware that the foundation of my love for Scotland has become a blend of Scotland’s glorious landscapes, our history and culture and the rich diversity of people who live here.

Nationalism and patriotism are complex issues and I don’t really want to get into that argument here, but the truth of the matter is that my connection with Scotland, especially wild Scotland, will always remain beyond and above politics.

The first time I experienced this sense of connection was on a youthful three-day trip on the Isle of Skye. Having reached the jagged crest of our toughest hills, the Cuillin, I experienced such a combination of ecstasy and relief that I could exalt in the wild surroundings in a way that could only be described as euphoric. In that heightened state it became clear to me that for the first time in my life I felt at one with the mountain. I wasn’t simply a visitor casually climbing some scree and rock – I felt I was part and parcel of the fabric of the mountain, the rock, air, water and light. For the first time I experienced a sense of kinship with that wild and inhospitable landscape. I had connected with the mountain and, in a sense, transcended my own being. It’s all to do with belonging and kinship, a sense of home and familiarity, like sitting down in an old armchair by your fireside and feeling at ease with the world. It’s not a bad place to escape to from time to time.

Today I rejoice in the fact that I can escape the constant barrage of negative news and ease myself into that comfortable chair, dram in hand, and enjoy those things that are wholly Scottish and mean a lot to me – listening to the haunting songs and fiddle music of friends like Julie Fowlis or Duncan Chisholm, reading or re-reading some of the old Scots classics like Sunset Song or George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, or I can take to the hills and connect with their timelessness, immerse myself in their beauty and majesty and wonder again at the contrasting insignificance of man.

The Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson once wrote, ‘Wilderness settles peace on the soul because it needs no help. It is beyond human contrivance.’ Beyond human contrivance. I like that, and I’ve discovered throughout the years that there is something fundamentally satisfying in those things that have not been manufactured or created by man: the song of a blackbird, the scoldings of a red squirrel in the pines above you, the magnificence of the Aurora Borealis. These are things that have always been, things of eternal value.

This book is essentially about a journey, a long and winding route from the backstreets of the South Side of Glasgow to the wild places and hills of Scotland and some of the mountains of the world where I’ve been fortunate enough to live out a dream. I’ve been living that dream for over forty years.

There have been many signposts along that route, often pointing in different directions, but the one element that has kept me to the true path is simply this – no matter what life throws at me, there’s always the hills.

Go and enjoy them while you can, before age and infirmity rob you. Love them and respect them and they will be kind to you, offering far more than you can give. Inhale deeply and allow the purity of the mountain air to bless you: run the rivers and explore the forests. Hug a tree or two. Contemplate the longevity of these wild places and compare it with our own brief flicker. Sit still and hear the silence or strike a rhythm to the music in a mountain stream and above all consider yourself a part of it all. You are not a stranger here and you are not an outsider. You belong here. And when you are living life in that other world to which you also belong, if things should appear dark, or gloomy, or sad or when plans go awry, just remember  . . .there’s always the hills.

1

Govan to Goat Fell

Winter arrived overnight with a flurry of mischievous wind, suddenly turning the ochres and russets of autumn into a world of pallid white. At a stroke, the fields and lanes around the village turned curiously unfamiliar and a deep hush fell over the woods. On the outskirts of the village, where ordered gardens give way to moorland scrub and grassy hollows, the white blanket had silenced the chatter of the streams and the only sound to be heard was that of a surprised blackbird, grumbling at the sudden loss of food and water. It was cold but the rising sun brought an illusion of warmth as it cast a golden glow across the delicate whorls and ripples of the snow surface, each tiny, unique snow crystal reflecting the light in a way that both twinkled and dazzled. The patterns of wind-blown snow ebbed and flowed, sometimes in great curves of drift, at other times in straight corrugated lines. Each fence post was topped by a white powder puff and drystone walls stood black and defiant against the white shroud.

In the days that followed more snow fell until I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had to climb a hill. The snow was deep, up to my calves, so I grabbed my snowshoes and made my way to higher ground. A groove of sheep tracks cut their way across the flanks of the hill, single-filed and delicate-hooved impressions, betraying small feet for such cumbersome beasts. Not far away a kestrel hovered in the sky, watching its prey that had suddenly become so exposed. There were few hiding places in such a white landscape.

I climbed all morning, delighting in the vibrancy and sharpness of the air. On the high point of the hill the wind that had brought the snowstorm had scoured the tops clear and the heather and grasses looked strangely unfamiliar. I lay against the cairn, my waterproof jacket below me for protection and my flask offering something hot and comforting. Away in the distance, above the deep valley, a pall of smoke hung in the air. Beyond it, etched against the icy blue of the sky, lay white horizons, as far as the eye could see – familiar shapes in unfamiliar shades – the line of the Glen Feshie hills and, beyond, the high Cairngorms, icy challenges for another day. Closer at hand the rolling uplands of the Monadh Liath lay as a winter wonderland for the wild land connoisseur. Gloriously beautiful, the snow simply wiped out the handiwork of man and returned the high places to a state of ice-cold wilderness. It was what mountaineering dreams are made of – the peace and beauty of the season, the stern fights with the elements, the memories of freedom and challenge. A return to something our ancestors held dear, something we may have lost.

I have no idea where my love of hills and wild places comes from. It could be a random gene, or an unconscious consequence of some early childhood experience, or something deeper and more profound than that. I’m often asked what it is about hills and mountains that attracts me so much and the simplest answer is that such landscapes make me feel happy. I feel comfortable in a mountainous landscape and extremely uncomfortable in the middle of a city. A forest walk heightens my spirit, an urban walk tends to depress me. I’ve never felt lonely on a mountain-top but a roomful of strangers can be wholly unnerving.

To my knowledge my parents had never set foot on a mountain before I came along. I suspect neither of them had ever even seen a proper mountain, other than in the cinema. Curiously, I recently had a conversation with my 99-year-old Aunt Jenny, my late mother’s sister, who told me that she would have loved to have climbed mountains as I have done, as there was always something inside her, a strange feeling, that attracted her to wild places. She simply never had the opportunity.

However, my father’s younger brother, Willie, emigrated to Canada in his twenties and, according to my Canadian cousin Laurie, spent a lot of time paddling his canoe in the Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. Some of the guys at Algonquin Outfitters apparently still remember him.

Another of my father’s brothers lived in Renfrew and regularly spent his summer holidays with Willie in Canada where they went hiking and canoeing together. I remember my Uncle John as a keen cyclist who often made long forays into the Scottish countryside. If there is such a thing as an ‘outdoor loving gene’ it may have come from one or all of these relatives.

It would be too easy to suggest that I was typical of those who were born in the slums of Glasgow and who grew up with a determination to flee the city streets at every opportunity. It’s certainly not an unfamiliar story. Ever since the dark days of the 1930s Depression, working-class climbers and hikers fled to the hills as often as they could and plenty of my peers had found themselves on a similar route. Poverty was rife in Glasgow in the thirties and it wasn’t a whole lot better in the streets of Govan where I entered the world in June 1950.

My grandparents’ house in Uist Street, where I was born (my mother refused to be admitted to a maternity hospital) was at the posh end of Govan – the Drumoyne end. Their house wasn’t one of the ubiquitous Glasgow tenement flats but a four-in-a-block apartment with a front and back garden. From their upper flat window you could look across the road into the playground of Greenfield Street Primary School. My father used to joke that so many of the local children had long marks running up their cheeks as a result of being breastfed through the school railings. Our kitchen window looked down onto a lawn and a bit of a garden, with trees – a small oasis that my grandfather cultivated and cared for with a passion.

In Glasgow, most schoolchildren are segregated into schools where different religions are taught. Greenfield Street Primary was the local non-denominational school. St Constantine’s Roman Catholic Church was just along the road, and youngsters who often lived next door to one another were separated at the absurdly early age of five. Beyond St Constantine’s was the Fairfield Working Men’s Club. My grandfather, William Brown, was a caulker in Fairfield’s Shipyard – a responsible trade that completed the process of making new hulls and decks watertight and leak-free. He was a quiet and dignified man who had fought at Ypres and the Somme with the King’s Own Borderers.

Quiet and dignified he may have been for most of the time, but he liked to let his hair down on a Saturday night. My mother and her sisters enjoyed telling the story at family gatherings. Wull would listen to the football results on the wireless before getting himself ready for his once-a-week visit to the pub. He would put on his good suit (his only suit), a collar and tie and slick his hair back with Brylcreem. My grandmother, grumbling quietly, would brush him down and send him on his way. He would return some hours later, the worse for wear, but Gran and her daughters would be waiting for him. The front door of the flat was at the foot of a long flight of stairs and Gran and the girls would lie in wait, anxious to hear the sound of Wull’s key in the lock. When he spotted Gran he would apparently greet her with a fond and slurred request, ‘Give us a kiss Lill,’ to which she would invariably respond, ‘Kiss my arse!’ The girls would help him up the stairs, then, on Gran’s command, would hustle him into the bedroom where more instructions were given, ‘Jaicket aff,’ she would command, followed by ‘troosers aff noo . . .’.

No sooner had poor old Wull been de-trousered than Gran would take the large white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and spread it wide over the bedspread while the girls raided his trouser pockets for loose change.

Gran would then take a few handfuls of the change, tie them up in the hankie and put it in her peenie pocket with the promise, ‘That’s for ma weans.’

Next morning Wullie, now sobered up but suffering a hangover, would say to my grandmother, ‘Lilly, have you seen my loose change? I thought I had more than that in my pockets.’ Gran, without a grain of guilt, would confront him with the words, ‘Are you suggesting I stole it? Eh, are you calling me a liar?’ To which Wull would respond by retiring to his chair by the coal fire, his dignified demeanour unsullied by needless argument.

William and Lillian Brown were my mother’s parents. There were seven in the family and my mother, Helen, was the youngest. Her sisters claim she was spoiled rotten, which my mother always denied. However, Mum, bless her, was a strong-willed woman who did like to get her own way.

My mother and father, Robert, who everyone knew as Bob, met at the dancing – the Dennistoun Palais or some other such popular Glasgow dance hall where the patter was as good as the music.

‘Are ye dancing?’ was the time-honoured request, to which the negative response was frequently, ‘Naw, it’s jist the way ah’m staundin.’

Once the couple took the floor the patter continued. ‘Aw, hen, ye’re wan in a million.’ The maiden might then respond, ‘Aye right’ (that lovely Glaswegian double positive that is actually a negative), ‘and so are yer chances.’

Years later, the Hamish Imlach song, ‘Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice’, celebrated the Glasgow dancehall humour, the story of Hairy Mary and her Weegie suitors and I remember, as a teenager, singing it to my folks. They both instantly recognised the old romantic come-ons . . .

My father was from Drumoyne. The McNeishs had historically fled south from Highland Perthshire in search of work and had settled in Lanarkshire, near Lesmahagow, where my great-grandfather worked in the coal mines. In search of better prospects he moved into Glasgow to work in the early days of the Clyde shipyards where my father’s father, another William, worked all his life. We knew him as Pop, a tiny man in stature but immense in character who was convinced he was the next Robert Burns. He was certainly an avid reader, like many working-class men of his generation, and was passionate about classical music. He was, in the widest sense of the words, self-educated, and all through his life he sincerely believed that if he emigrated to Canada like his youngest son he would be heralded as a great poet and Scots musician.

He played the fiddle, and that’s perhaps where my own love of traditional Scots and Irish music comes from. Pop played in a Scottish country dance band until he was into his nineties and turned up at my wedding with his fiddle case under his arm. My uncle Donald suggested he looked like an ageing Al Capone and the fiddle case perhaps hid a machine gun! My best man on the day, my old pal Hamish Telfer, was gracious enough to allow Pop to play a couple of tunes at the reception and he did – ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and something else that no-one recognised. I think it might have been ‘Oh, Rowan Tree’. He was about to set off on his third refrain when Hamish managed to drag him from the stage, listening patiently to Pop’s complaints that the rest of the band were completely out of tune.

Shortly after I was born in my grandparents’ house in Uist Street, my parents managed to rent a ground floor flat around the corner in Elderpark Street and that’s where I spent my toddler years. My father, a carpenter to trade, worked as a ship’s joiner in Fairfields where his father and his grandfather had worked before him. Around about this time he began taking night school lessons to get some qualifications that would allow him to train as a teacher.

Unlike today, when some mothers of young children go out to work to bring in a necessary second income, my mother didn’t work, but spent her days looking after me with the devoted help of her own mother. For some reason, probably because I was her youngest daughter’s firstborn child, my granny spoiled me, and she would often take me to one of Govan’s four cinemas for the matinee. I would sit on her knee and she would feed me sweeties: liquorice allsorts, soor plooms and chocolate toffees, bought with the proceeds of my grandfather’s Saturday night trouser pockets.

Dad eventually got his qualifications and spent a year training to be a teacher at Jordanhill College in Glasgow. On graduation he began teaching ship joinery at Glasgow’s Stow College of Building, from where he eventually transferred to Anniesland College of Further Education. I remember going for a walk with him when I was a young man and he proudly told me he had been promoted to the role of Senior Lecturer and that he would now have a reasonable income to spend on my mother, myself and my two younger sisters. His dreams never came to pass. He died suddenly at the age of 52 from a heart attack, the victim of forty fags a day.

Once Dad qualified as a teacher my parents decided to buy their first house, a Western Heritable bottom floor flat in a four-in-a-block house in nearby Cardonald. I remember that house with fondness – my sister Helen, five years my junior, was born there and I loved this leafy suburb where I could play with my pals, in particular Sidney Paton, who went on to become Vice-Chair of Scottish Natural Heritage, and Ian Cochrane.

The three of us began primary school at Angus Oval Primary on the same day and I have bittersweet memories of that introduction to learning. The school itself sat on top of a hill above the River Cart and the remains of Crookston Castle and I loved looking out from the playground across the fields towards the distant Gleniffer Braes, fields that were shortly to become the huge housing scheme of Pollok.

The downside of these early primary school days was my first teacher, a Mrs Ferguson, who often lashed us across the back of our legs with a twelve-inch wooden ruler if she didn’t think we were trying hard enough. She didn’t have a lot of patience with five-year-olds and soon I was looking for ways to avoid going to school. And there were better, more exciting things to do.

The River Cart flowed through the city from its source high in the Lanarkshire hills. By the time it reached Cardonald it was fairly mature and slow moving and absolutely ideal for rafting. My pals and I spent hours building rafts, largely inspired by two great boyhood novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. It took a lot of imagination to compare the White Cart with the great Mississippi but imagination was something we had in abundance.

Those early years also developed a skill that was to hold me in good stead for the rest of my life. Risk-taking is something that many youngsters are unfamiliar with these days and that, I believe, will have serious implications in generations to come. We knew that building a raft from oil cans and planks of wood and trying to float down the River Cart was risky but wasn’t life about adventure and fun? Wasn’t risk-taking worthwhile?

Occasionally we fell in the water and got wet but we soon learned how to swim; now and then someone would fall out of a tree and hurt themselves; it wasn’t uncommon to tear our clothing because of the old nails that were still imbedded in the planks of wood, but we never looked for someone to blame. We knew accidents happened, and most of the time we expected accidents to happen. The idea was to manage the risk in such a way that the expected accident could be avoided. Frequently we would argue and fall out and it would end in fisticuffs but more often than not we were pals again next day. We all wanted to play football in the school team but rarely felt inferior because we weren’t good enough. We simply learned how to deal with failure and disappointment. We drank from streams and pools of water and public fountains, ate blackberries from the bushes, stole rhubarb and crab apples from folk’s gardens and survived. Indeed, we survived with aplomb.

Our biggest fear was not being allowed out to play. This was the ultimate sanction for bad behaviour. Generally speaking, during holidays and at weekends, I left the house after a breakfast of tea and toast and turned up for a bite of lunch, usually a bowl of soup, before disappearing again until teatime. During the summer months, I would be outside again until bedtime. What did we do all the time? We had adventures, we explored, we spent very dirty hours playing in the old steam train engines at Corkerhill Junction and at one point built a den in one of the old passenger carriages, a den that was ours for the entire summer holidays. Part of the fun was evading the old watchman. We played in and on the river, cycling once we were old enough to get a bike (but never owned a helmet). We played football and roamed freely and, curiously enough, I only remember one incident that involved the police. I don’t recall what it was about but I do remember getting a clip round the ear from this big Highland polisman. Once was enough . . .

Young, well-groomed American men would often approach us and offer to teach us baseball. They were evangelical Mormons and, while we loved to play this curious American version of rounders, I don’t recall any of us attending any of the religious classes. We had become streetwise and I suspect that the streets of Cardonald were not a particularly fertile grooming ground for the Mormon faith.

We would build carts, called bogies, out of scraps, and ride them down the hill only to discover that we had forgotten to fit any brakes. We soon learned how to stop without brakes. We ate all kinds of rubbish: crisps, chocolate and sticky sweeties and we drank fizzy, sugar-laden drinks like Tizer and Irn Bru and Dandelion and Burdock but we never got fat – we were always too busy running around. If I wasn’t riding around on my bike I was just running, pretending I was Roger Bannister, or Emil Zatopek, or the great Herb Elliott. We didn’t walk anywhere.

The fifties and early sixties were memorable years. The austerity of the immediate post-war years was over and with it came the end of rationing. The Cold War cast a long shadow over the world but, despite that, remarkable things were happening. Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest, the highest mountain in the world, and the following year Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. An American actress called Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco and became a Princess. The Soviet satellite, Sputnik, launched the Space Age and a few years later the Soviets launched the first man into space in the shape of Yuri Gagarin and of course the Beatles produced their first of many hit singles, ‘Love Me Do’, and in so doing changed the whole nature of popular music. In 1954 IBM announced the development of a model ‘electronic brain’ – it was the dawn of the computer age, and a biologist by the name of Gregory Pincus led a team of scientists who invented the pill, the symbol of the UK’s most defining decade, the Swinging Sixties.

Maybe it’s not surprising that this particular generation has produced some of the finest risk-takers ever. Look at the legacy of innovation the past 50–70 years has produced. Freedom went hand in hand with occasional failure, as did success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it. Our youngsters of today are like a protected species and I often ache at the thought of their lack of freedom. I’ve no doubt it will have repercussions for society in the future.

From the perspective of a doting grandfather I can sympathise with my son and daughter-in-law who worry constantly about my two granddaughters and tend to keep them close at hand. It would be very easy nowadays to suggest that my own parents were irresponsible, but the fifties were very different from today. None of my peers had an inkling of what a paedophile was. We knew a few adults who seemed to our innocent eyes a little bit odd, but we simply avoided them. We were young active lads living in a fairly pleasant suburb but we were pretty well-informed about the birds and the bees and what delineated right from wrong, and we knew what it was like to get a good thrashing from our folks if we misbehaved. My dad had big joiners’ hands, like great bunches of bananas, and more than once I was at the receiving end of them, but never did I think I was being abused or assaulted. I knew my parents loved me and I also knew that if I did wrong I’d be punished. I knew how far I could push it, all part of the risk-taking learning curve.

I saw a map recently that graphically illustrated how times have changed. It was a map of the Sheffield area and it suggested that in the early part of last century it wasn’t unusual for a young person to have a ‘play radius’ of six miles or more. It told of an 8-year-old, called George, who was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing in the river. By 1950 George’s son Jack, also aged eight, was generally allowed to walk about a mile from his home to play in the woods. Jack’s daughter, Vicky, was allowed to walk half a mile to the swimming pool in 1979 and her son, Ed, is currently only allowed to walk on his own to the end of his street, about 300 metres.

Such are the fears that exist in our society today that many parents simply don’t allow